See Jack Hunt (See Jack Die)

by Nicholas Black

  Copyright © 2012

  by Nicholas Black

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage, photocopying, recording, and(or) any retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in review.

  Author's note: The events described in this work are fiction. As in, not real. Have not happened. Probably won't happen. And, unless you're whacked-out on some powerful drugs, nothing you read could ever happen . . . ever! All the characters are made-up, no more real than fairies and goblins and space aliens. So, seriously, if you should accidentally find a name, person, place, or product that is similar to any real, or living person, place, or product, don't start laying lawsuits on us. It's a total and complete coincidence, and your lawyers will laugh at you. This especially applies to ex-girlfriends and former parole officers.

  www.NicholasBlackBooks.com

  Copyright information:

  Synopsis

  See Jack run.

  Jack Pagan is 6 ½ months old. After an accident, his past is lost, forever. But his injury left him with a special gift: He can walk among the dead. Not only that, but he can also see the shadow creatures that take the souls from earth to the Land of Sorrows. Known by its inhabitants as . . . Deadside.

  He released 23 evil spirits onto the earth from this place of darkness beyond death. If left to their own devices, the 23 Evils will bring about a horrible change to the future of humanity. And their every breath challenges the forces of both good and evil.

  Run, Jack, run.

  In Ecuador, children are disappearing. And when bodies start turning up drained of their blood, Jack knows that it could be the work of the 23 Evils. Jack, Ricky, and Ms. Josephine start their new company, The After Life Group (ALG) to hunt down the escaped souls. But they are far from alone on this dangerous quest.

  But finding the Evils is only the first part. He must bring them all back to their nightmares. He must become the monster he can't remember. The murderer in his forgotten past. And to do it, he must cross between life and death, teaming up with the monsters that live in the shadows.

  Follow Jack on an haunting adventure that will change the way you think about life and death, and challenge the world you thought you knew.

  NOTE : Leaping out of one's body, and hunting down the 23 Evils should only be performed by licensed Professionals, who know how to deal with such horrible monsters.

  A novel by Nicholas Black

  copyright©2012 www.NicholasBlackBooks.com

  Other books by Nicholas Black:

  Fiction:

  Purg

  Burning Heaven

  See Jack Die.

  See Jack Hunt.

  Three Wise Men

  Contract Killer/The Messenger

  (With Jimmy DaSaint)

  Non-Fiction:

  The Last American Mercenary

  Walking Ghost

  Soul's Harbor

  visit: www.NicholasBlackBooks.com

  email: nicholasblack60@gmail.com

  Prologue

  Their plot to destroy the foundations of Religion, hatched in secret in the year 325 AD, it had not succeeded . . . not yet. But like all such conspiracies of debauchery and chaos, this story is not over. Often, what seems like chance and fate, are merely well thought out conspiracies.

  For what none but a privileged few knew, was that the 23 evils souls had escaped the Land of Sorrows, exactly as planned. Through their persistence and diabolical dedication, they had crossed back from the land of darkness and shadows, to the Earth, exactly as it had been prophesied.

  And this dark plot, born the exact same time as our religion was born, it is only just beginning. The days until the End are numbered. Steadily approaching. And these 23 evil beings, who chose to go against the will of God, they are walking the Earth. And they are not on a mission of peace. Unstopped, they may bring about the beginning of the end.

  And only the Pagan can stop them . . .

  ~ ~ ~

  Addison Circle, Dallas, Texas.

  July 10th . . .

  My name is Jack Pagan . . . and I am six months and seventeen days old.

  I can tell you one thing for certain. One exquisite promise. The truth of truths. And that is that things do go bump in the night. The things you don't want to see . . . they are watching you. When people talk about ghosts and goblins, they might be joking with you, but I'm not.

  All of that stuff that no right-minded person beyond the age of 12 would believe in . . . it's really there. Not that I'm an expert on this stuff. Hell, you could probably get better information by watching the Sci-Fi channel late at night. You know, right after Lake Placid 7 , or some deadly giant Anaconda movie. That's when you might get to learn something about the dark world beyond ours.

  Me, I'm just the biggest dupe in the universe. The most numb-skulled half-wit to ever walk among the dead. But then, I guess that makes me kind of qualified for this. I see things crawling around that most people don't.

  Some people, like my friend Ms. Josephine, she can hear them. Voices from another place. Echoes of the dead and what not. She calls it, communin' wit da dead . She's kind of creepy most of the time, but she knows things we can't know. Hears things that none of us can hear.

  I don't have any idea how she sleeps at night. I have a hard enough time closing my eyes when I know the world could disappear at any moment. But at least I can close out the monsters, if only for a brief while. Ms. Josephine, she hears them whenever they want to talk.

  My friend Ricky, he says that we are gifted—Ms. Josephine and I. I lean more towards cursed, but that's a semantic argument. Ricky says that arguments like that are absurd, and just to accept our new roles in this world.

  Our new jobs as trackers.

  Skip tracers of the darkness.

  As hunters of evil.

  I'm not really sure what we are, anymore. I'm still learning how to be a functional member of society. And you can't talk about monsters with normal people. Sure, they'll smile and nod their head. You know, trade a story or two about something a friend of a friend of a friend told them. But the second your gone, they laugh to themselves, and you go right on the nutbag crazy list.

  Instead of people saying, “Hey, there's Jack,” they say things like, “Here comes that lunatic that believes in ghosts.”

  “ . . . that moron that hallucinates.”

  “ . . . that dickhead that believes in monsters.”

  So, Ms. Josephine and Ricky and I, we basically keep our secrets. No need to spook the neighbors. And that is really difficult not to do. Especially when I'm glancing out across the balcony at a guy a few apartments over who is surrounded by these small, shadowy creatures that I call, spooks .

  He's just standing there in a pair of shorts and loose shirt, probably thinking about his taxes, or his girlfriend, or his sports car. Maybe he's happy. Maybe he's sad. I'll never know. The wind is barely moving, just enough to make it comfortable this morning.

  In his left hand is a magazine or journal or something. I can't tell if there's a picture of a yacht on the cover, or if it's a big house. Something expensive, I'm sure. So this guy, this guy I don't even know other than passing him near the elevator a few times, he's just relaxing. Doing pretty good for himself if he lives in this place.

  The loft apartments here are super expensive. If Ricky wasn't ugly rich , then I wouldn't be living here, for sure. So I watch this successful guy ponder the fabric of the universe. And even though I don't know anything about him, other than that he lives two floors below me, and four apartments to the right, I know that he's not
long for this world.

  There are spooks all over the place. They are short and thick, hobbling around, black as the darkest parts of cold space. They're just climbing, bouncing around. They're hanging on his balcony wall, coming in and out of his loft, studying him like he's already dead.

  Part of me wants to yell down to this guy; warn him. But it wouldn't make a difference. If the spooks are around, he won't be much longer.

  This guy I don't know at all, he's marked for death by the surest thing in the universe: the dark little creatures that work for the other side. Ticket salesmen for the Land of Sorrows. Otherwise known as Deadside.

  And they're really excited today. Like they get a bonus for this guy's soul or something.

  These are some of the things I get to see during a typical day.

  This unsuspecting successful guy, down and to the right of me, he glances around, just enjoying the smell of the different flowers that have blossomed their new life and color this morning.

  Crape myrtles, and roses, and morning glories, and plums.

  There's even the slightest hint of jasmine in the air. At places like this, they spend a lot of money on landscaping. Pretty colors and smells to cover the dirt, and concrete, and jagged metal.

  Lots of secrets are buried like that.

  This guy, he looks up at me and waves. And it's not one of those jerk-off waves. He takes his magazine and just kind of points it out to the world as if to say, look at how good we live.

  I wave back, knowing that I probably won't be seeing this guy in the hall too many more times. Judging by the spook activity that's exploding all around him, he'll be cold as Christmas by the time the sun goes down.

  I'll be reheating cold pizza, and this guy will be getting ripped apart by things more horrifying than anything he could ever imagine.

  1

  Luigi's Pizza, Addison Circle.

  Tuesday afternoon . . .

  I'm sitting here eating my second slice of pepperoni and mushroom pizza, nursing a Diet Dr. Pepper. I come here to this place whenever I need to think about things. I also come here when I'm hungry. So, really, I'm here most times. It's conveniently located six floors beneath me, and the pizza is always hot.

  I'm wearing a pair of faded blue jeans and a green t-shirt, and I think I need to back up a bit.

  The guys that work here, they know me as the nice rich guy who lives in the Penthouse with his younger brother. Ricky said it would be a good idea to tell people that we were related so that they don't start thinking we're gay. Not that we're scared of homosexuals or anything. Just that Ricky says that there is some prime tail in this neighborhood, and he wants to make the best of it.

  We don't really look alike. Ricky is tall and thin, with big curious eyes that make him look like he knows more than the rest of us do. Which, I think he might. Me, I'm shorter, with a stockier build. I'm actually in pretty good shape, and I thank the me that I've forgotten for that.

  Ricky helped me get back on my feet when I woke up in the hospital. He was an orderly at R.H. Dedmen Memorial Hospital in Dallas. He was one of the few people I could talk to that didn't look at me like some circus freak. He would come down and talk to me, explaining what all the doctor-speak really meant.

  See, Ricky went to med-school and got all the way to his last semester, and then he burnt out. He has a taste for the ganga , and it may be partially to blame. He says that he quit school because it wasn't what he thought it would be. So basically, he's like the smartest guy I know. He is my only friend, and by default, that makes him my best friend. Although, he'd probably be my best friend anyway.

  He knows all of the things my brain injury took from me. Oh, yeah, I had an accident that I should probably mention. About six months and seventeen days ago, Christmas Eve, I suffered massive trauma to the base of my skull which caused,

  “ . . . localized bilateral lesions in the limbic system, notably in the hippocampus and medial side of the temporal lobe, as well as parts of the thalamus, and their associated connections. ”

  I was dead, they say, for 67 minutes.

  Apparently, during that hour and seven minutes, the doctors and the monsters played tug-of-war with my soul. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—modern human science and technology prevailed and I lived.

  Now, for reasons that were very complex and frustrating to understand, I lost all of my longterm memories. I lost everything that was me. I have no idea who I was, what I did for a living, who I associated with, or what kind of person I was.

  Strangely, I did remember some things. I still knew basic things like math, English, and my insatiable hunger for pepperoni and mushroom pizza. I'll keep eating until it hurts. Seriously.

  Anyway, the doctors made it very clear that I will never recover my longterm memories. What made matters worse was that when they checked my fingerprints with all the police agencies, nothing came up. My DNA was a deadend, too. What I gather from this is that either I was not a criminal, or that I was an extremely talented and cunning one.

  When the state has cases like me, we get referred to the Neurology Department where all kinds of doctors and shrinks perform all manner of tests on us. You live at a county support service—be it a Manor , or a House— where you are looked after until such time as you can prove to them that you can become a productive member of society without going raving mad and machine-gunning people down at the post office.

  They call these places “tard-farms.”

  Anyway, while recovering I started seeing the spooks. At first it was just when I was falling asleep, or waking up in the wee hours of the morning. They'd creep around and basically scare the shit out of me. But I chalked them up to hallucinations. Just neuronal nonsense. You know, wires crossing in places that are still throbbing in my broken head.

  But I kept seeing the spooks. And now it wasn't just in the dark, anymore. I started seeing them when it was quiet, and when I got a little tired. Then I'd see them in the daytime.

  It got so bad I started seeing them around other people. I thought, hey, I've probably got some degenerative brain disease . Hoped, anyway.

  See, disease is something I can understand. I can cope with a sound, grounded answer to my pathology. A diagnosis I can live with, even if it's killing me.

  Give me my advanced schizophrenia.

  Find me a tumor developing in my parietal lobes.

  A double shot of brain swelling, even.

  But what I absolutely didn't want to hear was that everything was fine. That I was healthy. Fit as a fiddle. Because, if my brain is fine like they say, that meant that I was actually seeing the spooks.

  Well, Ricky advised me to go and see a woman named Ms. Josephine. She has a tarot card shop and mystical book store located in Deep Ellum, near downtown Dallas. Ricky knew of this place because there is a head shop located next door. Did I tell you he likes to smoke weed?

  So I visit Ms. Josephine at her dark, candle-lit shop. She's short and chubby, like you'd expect a voodoo priestess to be. She has dark honey-brown skin, and the most incredible eyes you've ever seen.

  And she says she hears things.

  Well, she hands me this book, called the Book of Sighs . Supposedly, she'd been waiting for me for several months, and this book would make sense to me. And since not much of anything made any sense to me, I figured what the hell.

  So I take the book, open it to the first page, and it's nothing but nonsense. All squiggles and dashes and dots and stuff. She tells me that eventually I'll be able to read it. I shrug, and then haul ass back to my apartment in the tard-farm, before the spooks come back.

  Ricky and I hit the Dallas Public Library and meet a librarian named Rupert. He helps us research the book, and we find out that it is very rare . . . and valuable. A mixture of Voodoo and Christianity. It was written at the same time as the bible, in 325 AD, by the same people who wrote the bible, at the Council of Nicaea. So the book is important.

  So important, in fact, that peo
ple are taking great measures to procure it. Even now.

  Turns out that the Book of Sighs was written by St. John the Divine, and is the other parts of the bible. The parts that we're not all supposed to hear about. The scarier stuff that isn't discussed in church.

  Just whispers and secrets about the Land of Sorrows. That's where the souls go when they're not wanted by God or Lucifer. Imagine it like a second Purgatory . . . for lost souls. A waiting ground for the damned.

  As the time goes by I see more and more spooks. Then I start to get haunted by this girl that looks oddly familiar. Discounting the fact that she's obviously dead, she was, well, attractive. I know that makes me a sicko, but it's true. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And I was certain that I knew her from my past.

  Anyway, I see her several times in my apartment, and eventually we start to communicate. She convinces me that she needs my help. That nobody had ever gone to heaven, and that they're all trapped in this Land of Sorrows. Something about a gate that should have been opened long ago. You know how aloof ghosts are.

  She tells me that this place is stacked right on top of our world, separated by the space of one tiny little electron. Just enough where we can't see them, and they can't see us.

  But me, since I was dead for so long, I'm able to walk on both sides. Deadside, and the Earth plane. So, not knowing any better, and finally able to make sense of the Book of Sighs, I agree to help.

  Ms. Josephine, Ricky and I, we perform an experiment where I crossover to the Deadside by facing my worst fear—drowning. Then I crawl out of my own body, through my chest, and see this dark, twisted place. It's just like our world, only melted and distorted. Bent and warped, with all of the color drained away. Everything is just different shades of gray and black. The people that live there, their only color is in their eyes.

  And it's cold.

  Really cold.

  And the longer I stay on Deadside, the closer my body gets to dying over there. See, my body temperature drops dramatically while I'm on the other side. It's all Ricky and Ms. Josephine can do to keep my body alive while I'm gallivanting around. Coincidentally, I have only 67 minutes in the Land of Sorrows before I go into complete hypothermia and end up a permanent resident.